University of Georgia (UGA) Costa Rica is an official international residential campus of the University of Georgia. The campus is located in the small community of San Luis de Monteverde, Puntarenas, Costa Rica. ¡Pura Vida!

Sampled and collected over 100 gallons of swine effluent from the UGA swine unit

Designed and built CO2 respiration/ammonia volatilization chambers

Insulated our LEMs against U.S. winters

Designed and built an application system to apply our treatments

And took hundreds of base-line samples

After a long, very smelly day of mixing and applying our LEM, False-LEM and Swine Effluent treatments, on Thursday Dec 4th 2014, the project officially began!

Now the real work begins. We have gotten the project off of the ground. The next few years, both here and in Monteverde, we will be measuring microbial activity using home-made CO2 respiration and NH3 volatilization chambers. We will be extracting nematodes from soil samples and analyzing their numbers and community structure. We will extract DNA samples and determine the different types of bacteria that are present and surviving in the soils. We will perform many different chemical extractions in order to measure the available nutrients of the soils. And these are just some of the array of soil analyses that we will preform on our plots. We will also perform various crop analyses which include taking near infra red readings which compare chlorophyll levels (greenness) as well as measuring yield and nutrient content of harvested crops. And maybe at the end of it all, we will have a slightly better understanding of the mystery of nutrient cycling that is constantly going on beneath our feet. We would love to share our findings and along the way, explain some of the science and mechanisms behind why we are doing what we are doing and how soil does what it does.